Animal Rights or Human Morals? The Protection of Animal Welfare in Executief Van De Moslims Van België and Others v Belgium

Did Belgium violate Article 9 by adopting legislative provisions limiting the freedom of religion of the applicants which required prior stunning in case of animal slaughtering?Was animal welfare a legitimate aim within the meaning of Article 9(2)?Was the restriction necessary and proportionate?Were the applicants discriminated against on the basis of their religious orientation?Link to Case: <https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-230858>. 1 repealed a pre-existing exemption that permitted the slaughter of animals without prior stunning.Subsequently, on 4 October 2018, the Walloon Region adopted analogous legislation.A similar amendment was considered by the Brussels-Capital Region but ultimately failed to pass.According to the decrees, it is now impossible in the Flemish and Walloon regions to slaughter animals without prior stunning, except in cases of force majeure, hunting or fishing, and pest control.Multiple organisations, representing Muslims and Jewish religious minorities, contested the legislation, as it impacted on the performance of animal slaughter according to their religious precepts.Both Halal and Kosher practices require that animals be conscious and alive before being killed by exsanguination.To accommodate these religious practices to some extent, the decrees provide for the alternative of reversible non-lethal stunning in cases of ritual slaughtering.The applicants lodged an application before the Belgian Constitutional Court, alleging the violation of their rights to freedom of religion and protection against discrimination.The Belgian Constitutional Court decided to stay proceedings and requested a preliminary ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (cjeu) on the matter,1 asking whether the Flemish decree conformed with EU law, specifically Regulation (ec) No 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing.2In the preliminary ruling proceedings, the position of the Advocate General Hogan was that the decrees were contrary to EU law, as they unduly restricted the applicant's freedom of religion.3However, in 2020, the Grand Chamber of the cjeu reversed these findings.The cjeu accepted that the restriction on the applicants' freedom of religion could be justified on the ground of protecting animal welfare, and that the measure was necessary and proportionate.In this regard, the cjeu affirmed that the protection of animal welfare was a legitimate aim of public interest as it was included in Article 13 of the Treaty of Functioning on the European Union (tfeu)4 as one of the values 1 Case c-336/19 Centraal Isralitisch Consistorie van Belgi and Others [2020] ecr I-7.For a comment, see L Hehemann, 'Religious Slaughtering, a Stunning Matter: Centraal Isralitisch Consistorie van Belgi and Others' (2021) 6(1) European Papers 111.To assess the decision in the context of the recent case law of the cjeu, see A Rasi 'On the Protection of the Right to Freedom of Religion in the Recent Case Law of the Court of Justice of the European Union' (